


peace of soul

by Anonymous



Category: Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018), Queen (Band)
Genre: F/F, Fluff and Angst, King! AU, Recovery, set during the break after hot space, tw drinking smoking and potentially alcoholism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:53:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22127443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Queen is on break after the Hot Space tour. Brianna is in Los Angeles. Freddie is recording in Munich. Joanna is moping in London, until a certain drummer decides it's time for the two of them to take a holiday to Switzerland.
Relationships: John Deacon/Roger Taylor
Comments: 5
Kudos: 19
Collections: Anonymous





	peace of soul

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the spring of 1983: Queen had finished the Hot Space tour in November and chose to take a year off after plans for a South American tour fell through. They would reunite to begin working on The Works in August of ’84. Other than that timeline, this is all completely fictional!

She has no idea in what state Regina found her in—can’t remember it, in all honesty, but she remembers multiple empty bottles on the floor and a distant running narrative of grumbled curses, _Christ’s sake, Jay, you can’t pick up a fucking phone?—_ and between those things she can put the pieces together.

She can’t feel bad about it. Not yet, anyway. It’s a little too easy to spin her wheels, and yeah, she’s past thirty years old now and should know better, but sometimes it’s easier to just let everything fall apart and try to pick up the pieces later on than it is to hold everything together. It may not be mature, but it’s sure as shit necessary and if nobody sees her do it, well, then nobody knows, anyway.

So she’d let it fall apart, and the four of them had let everything fall apart, and she’d wanted to die a little bit, and then the drinking had started. And months had gone by.

Now she’s in a car.

Regina is driving, hair loose and cut short between the weeks that they hadn’t seen each other, blond strands tangling and catching on themselves from the wind through the window. A pair of gold-framed Ray Bans are balanced on top of her head. It’s warm out, alarmingly warm. She’d forgotten there were places where it was warm and sunny in the world at this time of year, and she isn’t sure how. The grey of London has a habit of sinking into her bones.

“Where are we?” she asks, voice rough.

Regina glances over at her, fingers flexing on the wheel. “You know where,” she says softly.

She does. It’s hard to forget the mountains once you’ve seen them, and these mountains more than most. It’s hard to forget the way the quietness and charm seep into the mind thick and heavy the way no drug ever could.

Montreux.

“I’m not recording anything.” She dreads the idea. Brianna and Freddie aren’t around, and the idea of only half of their broken family sitting in the studio makes her almost as sick as the thought of seeing their errant guitarist and vocalist in the flesh.

“No,” Regina says. She sends her a tight smile. “No, don’t worry about any of that. We’re just getting away for a little while. I think you need it.”

“You think I need to sober up,” she says flatly.

“I think you need a break,” Regina says, voice gentle but tone firm.

“You know it’s a little rich coming from you, right?”

“Joanna, if I wanted you to stop drinking I’d drop you off at rehab,” Regina says in that same voice. “That’s not what this is. I need to get away too, alright? The last few months haven’t really been…”

She trails off, and Joanna turns to watch the Alps grow around them like giants. She can already feel the peace of the place sinking in, silencing the unending buzz of anger in the back of her mind and letting everything else float to the surface. She doesn’t want to think about it; not now, not when it still feels a little too raw. She just wants to forget.

“It hasn’t been easy,” Regina finishes quietly. “This’ll be good for the both of us, yeah?”

She doesn’t respond. She just sinks deeper into the passenger seat until the seatbelt digs into the side of her neck and closes her eyes, letting the sun play across her eyelids and the wind ruffle her hair.

Regina got them a penthouse suite, or maybe Crystal did, the ever-present shadow just on the edge of their sphere of operation. Regina must have sent him ahead because she meets him in the lobby as they park, bellhop carrying a few bags Regina brought toward the elevator with flourishing gestures as Regina pauses to talk to Crystal for a moment.

It hurts a bit to see him here, and all she can think of is happier times when everyone was together, forced into some sort of quasi-exile by Jim after he’d claimed the lack of distraction would push them to actually produce some music for a change. And it had—it had pushed them into an endless stream of inspiration, lazy afternoons and hazy nights clogged with Swiss wine and unending bass lines, the sound of Freddie’s voice drifting gently from the kitchen as she and Phoebe wrestled with the coffee machine the next morning.

She isn’t sure where Freddie is these days.

But then Crystal meets her eyes and sends her a curt nod, mouth downturned and tense, and then he hands Regina the keys to their room and turns away and the moment is broken as they follow the bellhop into the elevator and ride it up and up and up.

“It’s still the off-season, technically. It shouldn’t be too busy, so we shouldn’t be bothered,” Regina murmurs.

“We’re the former rhythm section of a dead rock band,” Joanna says. “Nobody knows who we are. We won’t be bothered either way.”

“Silver linings, huh?” Regina says wryly, and Joanna can’t quite hide her smile at that. Regina’s always shared her taste for gallows humor.

The room is more a flat, and a glamourous one at that. The floors are white marble, the ceilings high and spacious. She wanders through as Regina fusses about with their bags in the other room, feet bringing her through the spacious living room and past the kitchen island. If she’d had any doubts about this being a rehab trip she’s proven mistaken: a bottle of her favorite Cornalin sits on the counter. She takes it and the wine key resting beside it and works the corkscrew methodically into the cork as she paces slowly to the French doors leading to the balcony. They’ve already been opened, the air that drifts through sweet and warm, jostling the sheer curtains gently.

She steps outside and lets the sun fall on her face. Lac Leman glitters below, blue as the sky, the mountains rising out of the water and catching the light on their ice-encrusted peaks. If she looks down she can see the Quai Des Fleurs and hear the quiet lull of people talking as they stroll slowly by. Nobody is in any particular rush. People rarely are here, always a shock after London’s frantic pace.

She senses more than hears Regina behind her before appearing at her side to lean against the rail. If she sees the bottle that’s been half-forgotten in Joanna’s hands she doesn’t say anything about it. Instead she blinks into the light like a cat, the clear blue of the unpolluted sky perfectly reflected in her eyes. “Alright?” she asks.

Joanna nods, then shakes her head, then inhales and feels the air catch in her throat. It’s hard to draw a breath in all at once, and she can feel her eyes start to water.

“Deaky?” Regina asks softly, arm coming around her shoulders.

“I’m alright,” she gets out, but then her voice is cracking and her breath won’t come right and then the sobs start, and all at once Regina is around her, carefully taking the bottle from her grip and holding her for real, tucking Joanna’s face into her shoulder and petting through her hair as she murmurs words Joanna can’t quite understand.

Freddie and Bri should be here.

It’s been a few months now since it’s all gone to shit, and London had become a self-imposed prison for her. She’s been dealing with all of it—the fallout from Hot Space, the press, Freddie fucking off with Paul, Brianna fucking off to god knows where—she’d been dealing with it in her own way. She’s not in London anymore though, and the differences between there and here are impossible to ignore. It makes sense that it’s only now that she finds herself crying about all of it; about the horrible injustice of everything that’s happened since that fateful day in March of 1971: of finding a family and then watching it all fall slowly apart.

At least she still has Regina.

Regina kisses her cheek as she finally manages to take a shuddering breath, and when she pulls away Regina sends her a smile through watery eyes. Part of her feels guilty for making Regina cry, or at least for bringing on a situation where Regina felt the need to cry at all; but maybe she’s right in that they both need this. They need a break, and they need a way to understand what’s happened to them.

They need each other. They need that more than anything.

“Look at us,” Regina grumbles. “Couple of old drama queens.”

Joanna sniffs hard and wipes her eyes until she can see again.

“What do you say, huh? Dinner?”

“Do we have to go out?” Joanna asks.

“Nah. I’m tired of driving. There’s room service.”

Room service delivers fondue, and they spend the night eating cheese and drinking Cornalin and watching shitty movies on the telly until the two of them are dozing off on each other’s shoulders on the luxurious living room’s suitably luxurious sofa. And it’s _nice,_ in that aching sort of way that things used to be. It’s comfortable and warm, and joking around with her again feels right, and for a few hours she even forgets how much she misses the others on one hand and hates them passionately on the other. And if Joanna lets a few tears slip as the sun goes down Regina doesn’t say anything about it.

“I’ve been spending some time recording,” Regina says the next day.

The two of them are pacing along the Quai just for something to do, not a care in the world. It’s hard to have a care in this town at all, and Regina likes that. It’s not hard to remember that there is a rushing, bustling world outside of this place, but a feeling of happiness comes with that fact; she doesn’t need to be a part of that.

“Oh?” she asks hesitantly, and looks away to study the flower beds when Regina glances over at her. “I heard you were working on a few things.”

“Just a few, yeah,” Regina replies. “Playing around. You know. I’ve been trying to build my own sound for a while. I think it’ll pay off once we’re all back together again.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that, so she says nothing.

They’re reaching the south side of town, and she can see where the trees break in the distance to reveal the spacious courtyard in front of Mountain Studios—their studio, the one that they fell in love with and then bought, the one that’s been standing dusty and empty, the walls and amps and equipment not having heard a Queen song in months now—and she stops short.

Regina doesn’t protest, just wanders over to a bench that’s far enough from the courtyard that they can’t see it at all, and lights a cigarette as Joanna sits slowly down beside her.

“I could use some mixing help, you know,” Regina says. “Me and Mack have been at it for ages, but I could use your ear.”

“I’m no good with mixing,” Joanna protests, and Regina shakes her head with a rueful smile.

“That’s a lie and you know it.”

Joanna turns to look in the direction of the studio, but it’s completely obscured by the artfully curated flowers and greenery that give the promenade its name. She thinks of the spacious halls and the way they still seem to carry the echo of endless recording sessions and jazz festivals that had been held there.

That used to be a home to the four of them.

“Have you heard from the others?” she says instead.

Regina sucks on her cigarette and shakes her head again. “Bri’s in Los Angeles.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh yeah. Got something going on with Van Halen. I dropped in for a few days in April and did some vocal stuff for them.”

“You didn’t tell me,” Joanna says. She makes effort to keep her bitterness out of her voice; from the way Regina glances at her she isn’t entirely sure it worked.

“I didn’t think it was important,” Regina replies. “I was just checking in with her and it kind of happened.”

Checking in—she isn’t sure what that means, and she isn’t aware enough quite yet to read between the lines.

“Besides,” she adds, “it doesn’t really seem like they’re even going to release whatever it was they were working on. They were kind of just messing around.”

“Messing around?”

Regina nods. “Nothing really came of it.”

She knows that’s a lie—anything with Eddie Van _fucking_ Halen involved was bound to be a little more than just ‘fucking around’, let alone something that included Brianna’s sizeable genius and Regina’s soaring vocals as well—but she’s not quite stable enough on her own feet to point that out. Lord knows what Regina would say in response, and that’s what scares her.

She needs a fucking drink.

“Not like you’re missing out on anything,” Regina says, nudging their shoulders together companionably. “She’s dug herself into another deep hole of work, as per usual.”

“If she didn’t she wouldn’t be our Brianna, now would she?” Joanna mutters, taking a quick drag of smoke. It makes her head spin giddily, and she sighs.

“There you go. See, you’re not missing a thing.”

Joanna sighs again and stubs her cigarette out on the bench. She can feel Regina watching her as she does it and she carefully doesn’t meet her eyes. “Why are we here, Reg?” she asks flatly, eyeing the crystal blue of the lake.

Regina is silent for a moment. “We’re taking a holiday,” she says.

“Why did you haul me from my home and drive me to fucking Switzerland?”

“We flew,” Regina says, “and you weren’t home, not that you would know that.”

Joanna glares at her sideways.

“You were in my house, Deaks.”

“Like hell—”

“You drove yourself to my house at two in the fucking morning,” Regina says, and her tone is steely now, “and you passed out in your car in the driveway. And I put your ass on a plane, and now you’re in Switzerland.”

“Why am I _here?_ ” she snaps. “What, so I drove to your house and once you had to look me in the eye you actually gave a shit?”

“Drunk out of your mind, and it’s a miracle you didn’t get into a fucking accident, so how about—”

“It’s a miracle I didn’t get into an accident the last decade or so, let’s not kid ourselves,” she says shortly.

“That’s what this is about?” Regina huffs.

“You’re damned right it is.” She crosses her arms. “You know what, Reg? Fuck you if you think this changes anything. You can—”

“Oh, that’s _rich fucking talk,_ ” Regina says loudly.

“You think you can fix anything?” she snaps. “It’s been broken since the start.”

“I _know_ I can fix something!” She’s shouting now, properly shouting like she used to when she was still a spitfire in uni who hadn’t gotten a handle on her temper yet. “Like you’re any better sitting around drinking and moping all day?”

“Fuck you if you think you can blame me for—”

“And _fuck you_ if you think you’re the only one who has to deal with this!” Regina shouts. “Fuck’s sake, Joanna, open your eyes for a change! You think this is easy for any one of us? You think you’re the only one having problems with this break? This fucking ‘gap year’? Cause the last tour left us all in such a good place, and of course as soon as we’re all done doing our solo shite the first thing we’ll be doing is running back into each other’s arms? Is that it?!”

She takes a breath, and for a moment Joanna thinks she’s going to throw a punch.

“You couldn’t pay me to look Freddie in the eyes right now, but you know what? We’re doing the best we fucking can, and we’re all trying to move on, and we’re all trying to be _better_. So tell me to go fuck myself all you want, thinking that you’re the only one who’s struggling with this. You can fuck right off.”

Her chest is heaving by the end of it, and Joanna stares at her as she lights another cigarette and inhales quickly to hide it.

“’Fuck you’,” Regina mutters mockingly. “Yeah, fuck me. Whatever. All I’ve ever done is try to help you, Jay. Maybe consider for a minute that sometimes the rest of us need some fuckin’ help too.”

Joanna swallows and turns back to the mountains. She feels her eyes prickle but she refuses to let a tear so much as gather. It isn’t worth it.

She can feel the shadow of the studio looming behind them.

“Why are we here?” she asks quietly.

She thinks for a moment that Regina isn’t going to answer. She thinks she’s going to stand up and walk back to the hotel, or maybe to the nearest car that will take her right back to Geneva, to the airport and to home.

But Regina takes a slow breath, easy like the exercises she’d learned to control her anger with in the first place. Joanna counts silently in her head to five, the same beat she knows Regina counts, because when Joanna reaches four Regina is exhaling slowly, easy as the fresh mountain wind.

“We’re here,” Regina says slowly, “because when everything got so out of control that we didn’t know up from down, when Bri was fucking her way across America and Freddie was starting to get into harder and harder stuff, when you and I…” she starts, then trails off. “When the four of us started to lose sight of everything we’d ever dreamt of, Miami sent us here.”

Joanna nods. She remembers. “For peace of mind,” she murmurs.

“For peace of mind,” Regina echoes with a tiny smile. “And because the four of us took all of the bullshit that happened in those eight years, and we learned how to get around it. To become a family again. After everything we were able to remember we were the same people we’d always been.”

Those first weeks in Montreux had been dreadful; Joanna remembers being bored out of her mind, and Freddie had whined to the same effect. There were no clubs, no dancing, no drugs, no entertainment. And then the silence had truly seeped into her brain, and just like that she’d started hearing music in her head again, some unknown internal source striving to fill in the gaps, unending and increasingly intricate, basslines to narrate her steps and thoughts and breaths.

“We’re here because there are still places where people don’t know you,” Regina says, turning to look at her. “You aren’t in the spotlight and you aren’t alone. And all the fights we’ve had here, all the songs we’ve struggled with here—”

“David Bowie,” Joanna murmurs.

“David _fucking_ Bowie,” Regina says with a watery laugh. “We can’t forget any of that, not here. It’s a part of who we are, but that doesn’t mean we can’t move forward with it.”

Joanna sniffs against the pressure in her throat and picks at the fraying edge of her skirt. “That was beautiful, Reg,” she says finally, the flatness of her tone betrayed by a teary note.

“Aww, _Deaky_ ,” Regina croons, dragging her into a headlock that makes her yelp.

“Get off, you _fucking heathen—”_

They spend the night curled up on the white satin sofa, the gold filigree decorating the intricately carved arms reflecting the light of the telly as they watch cheesy sci-fi shows and drink wine. Regina falls asleep against her shoulder, the feathery edges of her hair tickling Joanna’s jaw, and Joanna allows herself a smile about it.

It’s a pattern that she wouldn’t struggle to sink into. It’s not so much different than what she was doing at home, really, but something about having Regina here is invigorating in a way she’d somehow allowed herself to forget. Staying in with no obligation to see anyone is safe. It’s comforting.

But with Regina here, with the other half of what used to be rock and roll’s supersonic volcano talking and breathing and moving and _present_ by her side, she can feel an old itch start up again somewhere in her chest. She can feel herself thinking again; she can feel her fingers twitching in a way that has nothing to do with anxiety and agitation for a change, and everything to do with the fact that her friend—her partner—her counterpart is back.

Regina shifts against her in her sleep, and Joanna wraps an arm around her shoulders without even thinking about it.

They catch their old rhythm of life the next day, and it sticks. Regina attempts to cook and then sits back while Joanna does her best to salvage the charred results, Joanna falls back into the habit of messing around with Regina’s cameras and building a steady pile of developed photographs on the kitchen island, and the two of them play their music too loud and tear apart tabloids when all else fails. Joanna manages to avoid the impulse to drink herself to sleep, and then ends up laying awake all night.

She draws her first real breath in months the next morning when the heavens open and rain comes pounding down, sending people laughing and running for shelter on the Quai des Fleurs below. She steps outside onto the balcony and watches. Over the sound of the rain she can hear Regina singing along to Get Back on the radio. Hearing music usually stops the itch in the back of her head, but this time it only makes it worse. Her fingertips ache.

“Do you need anything?” Regina asks her for the umpteenth time.

Joanna is walking in circles around the rooftop balcony—has been for the last half-hour or so, lost in thought. The sun is breaking, warming the stones beneath her bare feet and leaving the puddles there warm and shiny. She slaps her feet across them hard every time she comes across one, and the satisfying smack of it echoes nicely off the rhythm in her head.

She can’t shake the beat loose from her mind, a chugging seven-four thing. It’s always bounced around in there, ever since ’73 when Roger Waters decided to send it careening up the charts, and maybe it was just a side-effect of being a young, impressionable bass player in need of a good idol or two. Or maybe it’s a bass player thing—a rhythm section thing, really—to always have something—

“Deaky?”

She pauses before the next puddle. “What?”

“Do you need anything? You’ve been out here for a while now.”

Joanna shakes her head, then frowns. “I dunno.”

“What is it?”

“Just thoughts. Can’t get them out of my head.”

“Shocking, for you,” Regina drawls. “There’s not usually much going on in there.”

Joanna snorts but doesn’t say anything. It must’ve been out of character; Regina’s face pinches in concern again.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” Joanna says quickly.

“Do you want space?”

“I don’t mind. It’s not about you.” What she really needs is to go…do something. Probably at the studio, but she doesn’t _want_ that, so. “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.”

Regina hums uncertainly. “If you need me, I’m here.”

“I know.” It doesn’t feel like enough, all at once. She amends it. “Thanks.”

Regina smiles at her. “Anytime,” she murmurs, disappearing back inside.

The restlessness ends up getting the better of her in the afternoon. Regina is presenting an angelic image where she naps under a white fur throw on the couch; she keeps her voice down as she calls Crystal to pull the car around just as the sun is finally breaking for real, too lazy to drive herself around and sightsee at the same time. He drives her through the mountains for about two hours while she blows smoke out the window.

“It’s good to be back around here,” he murmurs, taking a curve at perhaps slightly faster than is recommended. Joanna doesn’t mind.

“Yeah?” she asks. “I thought you were spending some time at the studios.”

“Munich. It’s not quite the same.”

“No?” she asks dryly.

He snorts. “You know what I mean. Munich is a goddamned mess every time we end up there. And that’s not to say I’m not having the time of my life because I _am,_ surrounded by clubs and bars and all—”

“And the great Regina Taylor, of course,” Joanna supplies.

“Oh, aye, lugging her drunken arse all over the city is just the cherry on the cake,” he nods, then sobers quickly. “I just mean you lot. And some of the others, I suppose. It feels like everyone’s running full-speed toward a brick wall or something. Montreux is different. It’s home.”

She raises her eyebrows behind her aviators. “I didn’t realize you were so sentimental about it.”

“Right? Enough of that. If you want to get weepy about it get Brianna on the phone. She’s got a whole spiel.”

“And yet she’s not here.”

Crystal looks at her sideways. “As if she’s not coming back.”

Joanna tilts her head.

“Please. Have you met her? Hell, have you met Freddie? Biggest damned softies ever to hit the rock and roll big leagues. I’m blessed to be stuck with you and Reg.”

“That’s one way of keeping the glass half full.”

“Fuck. Enough of this. Put some music on.” He gestures to the stash of cassette tapes in the glove compartment. She unearths a barely-played copy of Fresh—Regina and Crystal continue to shock and awe—and cranks the volume. The bass seeps straight into her bones, smooth and soothing.

She gets back to the penthouse at around dinner time.

“Alright?” Regina asks her.

She nods. “Alright,” she says, then walks over to the sofa, lays down on the satin and immediately falls asleep.

The week crawls by.

She adds to the pile of photos on the counter. Most of them are of flowers from the quai, but there’s one of Regina asleep and drooling on the sofa that she’s particularly proud of.

She can’t quite kick the itch in her fingers every time she hears Regina singing unknown melodies in the other room, but she can hardly do anything about it.

Lyrics keep coming to her in ways she can’t stop— _I can’t get used to living without, living without, living without you,_ and when she hears a voice singing it in her head it’s Freddie’s bold tenor, just this side of campy—and she does everything she can to push the urge to write away. She’s not ready; not yet.

“A bit loud?” Regina yells over the blaring music in the kitchen. It’s Fresh. Again.

Joanna shakes her head as she peels a carrot. “Nah. You think so?”

“A bit.”

“You’re a drummer. Aren’t you supposed to be deaf, anyway?”

Regina waves her off and heads out onto the balcony for a smoke.

“There’s never anything to do here,” she gripes to Crystal later that night.

He laughs. “Isn’t that the whole point?”

It only takes two more days before she gives into the way the beat refuses to leave her head, the same way it always does in Montreux. She kicks herself for it, but there’s nothing that can be done.

She’s up early that morning and nearly upends her flask into her tea half out of habit and half out of spite, but then she catches herself and dumps two sugars into it instead. She’ll call that growth.

Regina emerges as she’s stirring the cup, and then stands in the doorway of her bedroom and frowns at her in surprise, scratching her stomach sleepily. “You’re up,” she says.

Joanna raises her eyebrows. “Astute.”

“You’re up _early_.”

She hums and purses her lips. “I was thinking we should go to the studio today.”

Regina’s frown deepens. “The studio.”

“Yeah,” Joanna says, raising her eyebrows again and taking a sip of tea.

Regina wanders closer, squinting at her carefully. It takes a few seconds for Joanna to put two and two together, and then she huffs and rolls her eyes. “I’m not fucking _high.”_

“I didn’t say you were,” Regina says defensively. She turns to pour a cup of tea, and Joanna tries not to let her eyes catch on the way her baggy t-shirt is catching on the curve of her bum. “Alright, the studio. We can go to the studio. Do you have something?”

Joanna shakes her head. “Show me what you’re working on,” she says.

Regina pauses to look at her again. “A lot of it is at Musicland.”

“Sure.”

“As is Mack.”

“There’s a lot we can do without Mack,” Joanna says.

“There’s a lot we can’t.”

“Then we don’t have to do anything. Just show me.”

Regina huffs. “Fine. Alright. Get me a chance to get dressed at least, woman. Good grief.”

Joanna laughs quietly and watches as she shuffles back to her bedroom.

She runs her fingers across the horn of one of the studio basses resting in a stand. It’s an older Precision she doesn’t really remember buying, or maybe it wasn’t hers in the first place. She can’t remember. 

“Has anyone been renting?” she asks. 

Regina shakes her head. “Not that I know of. It’s all ours these days.” She flicks a switch and the lights in the sound booth come on. “Not too many groups even come up here anymore.”

“No?”

“No. They’ve all followed suit with Fred, from what people are saying.”

“Munich?”

“Mm.”

“Seems to be where the party is,” Joanna murmurs, pulling her fingers away from the bass and examining the dust on her fingertips. “I don’t blame them.”

“No. Me, neither. It means we’ve got our space, anyway.”

Joanna tugs the cloth away from the piano. It moves along with a cloud of dust, revealing pristine shiny black paint. She lazily puts her fingers to the keys and bangs out the opening bars of You’re My Best Friend. Regina laughs, and she smiles. 

“Didn’t know you still knew that one.”

“How would I forget?” 

Regina snorts and wanders over to what Joanna knows is a drum kit hidden away under a white sheet. When she grasps one end and yanks the cymbals rattle threateningly. 

“Have you been playing recently?” 

Regina looks up even as she grabs a pair of sticks. “Drums? Nah,” she says. “It’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? I haven’t played in months, I don’t think.”

“A rock and roll drummer who doesn’t play the drums,” Joanna muses. “What must the Americans think of you?”

“A bassist with no bass,” Regina counters, bashing out an aggressive roll, flipping her hair over her shoulder with a sharp turn of her head. 

Joanna smiles ruefully, eyes drifting back to the p-bass in the corner. She meanders closer to it until she can cup the neck in her fingers. “We really did replace ourselves, didn’t we? Keyboard basses, drum machines…”

Regina starts playing—actually playing like she used to, her shoulders somehow appearing impossibly wider beneath the thin straps of her dress. She always appears bigger than life like this, somehow stronger and quicker and more dangerous than the petite, doll-eyed woman she really is. 

Joanna loves her for that. 

She picks up the bass in her hands, turning it over once before sitting down on top of the amp and flicking it on with her heel. She plugs the bass in and gradually starts tuning it. “I think I haven’t played in longer than you,” she shouts over the drums. 

Regina grins. “Oh yeah?” she calls back. 

“My calluses are all gone.”

“Time to rebuild them, then.” 

Joanna snorts. Despite what she’d said her fingers fall easily into their old paths. A riff comes to her first, and she only recognizes it a beat later—Keep Yourself Alive, one of the first songs she’d learned for Queen, the notes ever-familiar. It only takes Regina one measure before she falls into the rhythm of it, smiling as she recognizes what Joanna is doing. 

“You’re really going to force me through that solo?” she gripes. 

“As if any member of this band has ever had to be forced to play a solo,” Joanna says dryly. 

Regina laughs and attacks it as readily as she ever has. And Joanna isn’t really sure if it’s right. She doesn’t remember, or maybe her memories are being replaced with other things. Either way it doesn’t matter. Regina is as beautiful as ever, her hair sticking to the sweat beading on her forehead and her lips pressed outward in concentration. 

Joanna doesn’t realize she’s put her bass aside until after it’s already happened, until she’s already moving closer to the drum kit, eyes trained on Regina all the while. Regina doesn’t notice, or if she does she doesn’t let on. She only seems to notice Joanna when her rhythm falters as she misses a beat, second-guessing the way the solo is supposed to go, and then she’s laughing breathlessly as she lets it peter out with a few dull thwacks against the snare. When she looks up and sees Joanna she grins. 

“What are you looking at me like that for?” she asks, chest heaving slightly. 

Joanna isn’t sure. She says the first thing that comes to her mind. “I wish things were like they used to be in the beginning.”

Regina blinks and stands slowly. The traces of a smile are still tugging at her mouth. “Like they used to be,” she murmurs. 

Joanna nods. 

Regina holds her gaze for a long moment. Joanna can’t read her—whether she’s disgusted, scared, anxious—Joanna has no idea. Surely she knows what Joanna is talking about. She has to know. 

She steps neatly around the drum stool, turning one stick over and over in her hand. “The world was bigger back then,” she murmurs.

Joanna shrugs. “We just hadn’t seen as much of it.” 

“Do you miss that?” Regina asks. She licks her lips. “The way the future was before us? It’s not over, you know. We’re not done quite yet.” 

“Is that what you know?” 

“Is that what you miss?” 

Joanna smiles ruefully and looks away. Her eyes catch on the windows overlooking the lake, and she watches an old couple meander slowly down the quai. “I mostly just miss you,” she says quietly. 

“You have me.” 

Regina is looking at her with careful blue eyes and a set jaw. It’s an expression that allows no argument, and Joanna is more than familiar with the sight of it. “Do I? Not like...you know. Not like before.” 

“You know that’s not true.” 

Joanna shakes her head, frowning. 

“Don’t you? Joannie, you haven’t lost a damned thing and you know it. You’re running like the world is crumbling behind you. It’s not. You’re acting like you’ve lost everything, but you haven’t. Nothing’s really changed.” She puts her sticks down on her snare without looking, pacing slowly closer like she’s approaching a wild animal. 

“Everything’s changed.” 

“Not this. Not us. That’s all in your head, love.” 

Joanna shakes her head again. Regina is close enough to reach out and touch, and she lowers her voice so that it reaches only the space between them and nothing more. “Do you really mean that?” she whispers.

Regina answers that question. She glances at Joanna’s lips before meeting her eyes again, asking silently, and when Joanna only holds her gaze she leans forward and presses their lips together. 

Joanna can feel the heat radiating from her body. Her mouth is warm and insistent, carefully patient, and she can’t even think about resisting pulling her closer. She cups the side of her face gently, tracing over the overheated skin of her cheeks, before Regina bites playfully at her lips and utterly ruins any chance of this being a chaste encounter. 

Regina pulls her away from the drum kit until her own back collides with the mixing console, and Joanna knows that’s a thousand-pound piece of equipment but she can’t resist pushing at Regina’s hips until she’s pressed right against the thing. The fabric of her dress is sleek and flimsy in Joanna’s hands, and when she rucks it up against the smooth skin of Regina’s hip Regina gasps into her mouth. 

“Is that proof enough for you?” Regina breathes. 

Joanna laughs against her jaw before biting and sucking at the skin there. 

“This is hardly good studio etiquette.”

“I don’t care,” Joanna says, palming at the skin just below the curve of her ass. Regina laughs against her jaw. “Besides, you’re one to talk. You started it.”

“Well, it’s our damned studio, isn’t it?” she says. 

Joanna laughs again and lets Regina drag her t-shirt off over her head before bracing herself and lifting her onto the edge of the mixing desk. Regina lets out an aborted squawking sound into her mouth, arms wrapped around her shoulders for dear life. When she pulls away finally it’s to curse up a blue streak. “Christ, a little warning?” 

She grins and kisses her hard, and Regina’s arms wrap even more insistently around her bare shoulders as she moans. It’s messy and aggressive, and Joanna groans and sucks on her tongue even as she works Regina’s panties carefully down her hips, Regina tilting her hips up to help, and they go flying in much the same way as Joanna’s shirt went a minute prior, and then Regina is letting out a shaky breath against her cheek as Joanna’s rough palm traces up the outside of her thigh, and—

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ!” 

Joanna pauses mid-hickey to Regina’s throat as Regina turns toward the door. “ChristopherTaylorwillyoulearntofucking _knock!”_ Regina screeches in one breath. 

“It’s a fucking studio, Reg, not a goddamned boudoir!” Crystal yells, one hand thrown over his eyes. “I can never unsee this and I’m gonna need _therapy_ for years, Jesus—”

“I don’t give a shit! Knock next time!” 

“Don’t strip each other half naked in a public space next time!”

“Get the fuck out! Oh my god! Why are you still here?!” 

“Christ’s sake!” he shouts, still cursing loudly as he leaves the room. 

The door slams shut. The two of them sit there in dead silence. 

It’s Regina who breaks it first with a snort. 

Joanna follows suit, and all at once she can’t stop laughing. She leans her forehead against Regina’s clavicle and laughs till her eyes well with tears. 

She falls asleep in Regina’s bed that night, her head cradled against the other woman’s shoulder, a roughly callused hand carding through her hair and the smell of Regina’s shampoo tangling into the sheets.

Before that, they make up for lost time. And after they make up for lost time, they talk.

Joanna turns to look at her, taking in the blue of her eyes and the sheen of sweat on her forehead. Regina is loose-limbed and a little dopey, a tiny smile still stuck permanently to the corners of her mouth.

“You look good like this,” Joanna whispers to her.

The smile grows. Regina pulls her closer and kisses her shoulder. “You _feel_ good like this,” she replies with a grin.

Joanna smiles and settles against her. It’s comfortable, being together like this.

Unfortunately it’s short-lived. The happiness gives away to anxiety the way it always seems to. She can’t stop thinking about what they might’ve lost, what they might never gain back, and she can no longer keep her fears bottled away to herself.

“What would you do,” she whispers into the faint gold light filtering through the curtains, “if we never go back to the way things were?”

Regina rolls over onto her stomach, chin propped up on her own folded hands as she looks Joanna over. “You mean…”

“I mean if Fred and Bri never come back to us.”

Regina snorts. “If Bri never comes back to me I’ll go to Los Angeles and kick her ass myself,” she says conversationally.

“Be serious.”

“I’m dead serious, babe,” she replies. “As for Freddie? Between you and me, I can’t imagine a world where she doesn’t return to her family eventually. She’ll come back to us when she’s ready. Something tells me it won’t be long.”

Joanna rolls that over in her head, studying the light playing across the ceiling. “What if she doesn’t?” she murmurs eventually. “Just…you know. What if that doesn’t happen?”

Regina sighs, rolling over again and tugging Joanna closer. “It will,” she says, and the certainty in her tone is so steady that Joanna can’t find it in herself to argue. “They’ll come back. We always come back to each other. But in some alternate, fucked up universe where they didn’t,” and she pauses to press a kiss to the top of Joanna’s head, “which by the way is a universe I’m _positive_ we don’t live in—if that were the case, then I guess I’d just have to find another way to feel satisfied. And given the way my life has gone for the past few weeks, I don’t think that’ll be too hard.”

Despite everything, that manages to warm her.

She’s happy when Regina is around. Even with the stress, even with her ever-present anxiety and the dark spell she’s barely managed to shake off, something about Regina’s presence soothes over some ruffled part of her. Something settles into place, steady and warm and _right_.

Things aren’t perfect. Nothing about the future is certain. Despite that she allows the calm to creep up on her like a fog and allows it to drag her into a dreamless sleep.

It’s a crisp morning, the sun not yet setting into its relentless heat of summer. The grass is wet with dew. She can smell the moisture in the air from the open window, and when she walks over and looks out the lake is a glittering mass more brilliant than any gold disks or crowd of flashing cameras ever could be.

The sun is as bright and clear as it always is here, rising up above the mountains and casting the world in a light so sharp it’s surreal. Her eyes aren’t what they used to be—and she’s sure she can thank uni for that, along with increasingly late nights hunched over the blinking lights of a recording booth—but still the clarity of the world is stunning.

It’s been months since she felt the kind of reality she feels now, and it feels like waking up as clear and sharp as the sun’s rays. She knows where she is. She can feel the air against her bare arms, and she marvels in it. The world is no longer happening to her; she is happening in the world, right here and right now, and the air parting to make room for her to pass is proof of it.

The penthouse is silent. Regina is still asleep in the warm white cocoon of her bed. The world outside is only barely waking up.

She looks to the rotary phone resting on the marble side table in the corner. She thinks about dialing Brianna. She doesn’t have the number. Freddie, then. She knows the phone number of Musicland by heart.

She paces closer and sits down on the corner of the white sofa, regarding the phone out of the corner of her eye. Maybe it’s not a good idea. Either way it’s not a good idea to make decisions like this before her first cup of coffee.

Despite that, something about the night has left her feeling smoothed over and polished. Maybe this is what she needs; here, in the stillness of the morning, in the minutes before the day begins which feel like the second half of a dream, she feels equal parts assured, reckless and at peace. Maybe this is what she’s needed this whole time.

All the four of them have ever really needed is each other. If she isn’t the one to make the first step forward, then who will be?

Just as she makes the decision to reach for the phone, it jumps as it begins to ring.

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a short one shot I've been working on for a while now! I hope you enjoy :-) please let me know what you think!


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